Elon Musk is closer to their Iron Man than you would like.
Once your kids start to get into the third, fourth grade, it becomes increasingly clear how lame (and how old) they think everyone your age is. One’s jokes become Dad jokes super fast, is what I’m saying. The looks kids give adults once they hit 10, 11, 12 years old is a perpetual combination of eye-rolling and cockeyed shrug. Everything we do is stupid to them. (I’m not even necessarily sure they are wrong.)
Their heroes, then, are never old folks like us. They are kids, or at least as close to kids as they can find. Billie Eilish. Tom Holland. Zendaya. Justin Bieber, somehow, still. (Justin Bieber is now older than Kurt Cobain was when he died, so you know.) But when kids my sons’ age start talking about famous people they admire — or just, you know, think are awesome — it’s always a little unsettling how often one guy’s name comes up: Elon Musk.
Elon Musk is 50 years old — he’ll be 51 in June — which should him a lamestain old fart like the rest of us. But to kids? To kids, Musk is Iron Man. He’s the richest person they know, but he’s not old and crotchety, like traditional old rich people they might know of like Bill Gates or, for that matter, Donald Trump. Musk, perhaps because he works in technology, perhaps because he’s associated with something cool like outer space, perhaps because he’s always dating young people, perhaps because he Tweets constantly, somehow feels younger to young people. And thus he doesn’t seem to them like some soulless libertarian nightmare. He just seems like the perfect cartoonish persona of a rich guy.
I hear this constantly from kids. If there’s a problem, the person who can solve it is not Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or even their teacher: It’s Elon Musk. “Why don’t you just have Elon Musk buy the team?” I heard one kid tell another at a Little League practice the other day. “We’ll get to play baseball on the moon!” There is no issue that cannot be solved by a billionaire coming in on his spaceship. This strikes me as regression, the idea that resolutions cannot be found in dedication to a common purpose, but instead only by the deus ex machina of a rich guy with a magic wand. “Billionaires” was not a term I’d even fathomed us as a kid. Now they’re the omnipresent being in the clouds who will fix everything. They’re God.
American society has always held up the ultra-wealthy as North Stars. We hate them, we want to be them, we envy them, we worship them, we love to see them crash and burn. But it strikes me as a very bad sign that, to our kids, they’re not just figures to emulate: To kids, they’re our saviors.They’re the only ones who can get anything done. But why wouldn’t kids think this? They see how terrible everything is, and how lousy a job the rest of us are at doing anything about it. Maybe they can help. Maybe Elon Musk help.
The bad news is, of course, the billionaires will be no help to us — they are, in many ways, the problem. And Elon Musk, in particular, is no Tony Stark. They may need him to be, though, at least emotionally. They can sense our unease. Our unease will someday become theirs. No need to show them the real Elon, and the real Any Of Us, until we have to. Let them enjoy being kids, and having the fantasy of someone looking out for them. They’ll find out the truth soon enough.
Will Leitch writes multiple pieces a week for Medium. Make sure to follow him right here. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his family and is the author of five books, including the Edgar-nominated novel How Lucky, now out from Harper Books. He also writes a free weekly newsletter that you might enjoy.
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